I am a leadership advisor to Fortune 500 CEOs and Boards, author of "Hacking Leadership" (Wiley) and "Leadership Matters" (2007), the Chairman at N2Growth, a member of the board of directors at the Gordian Institute and recognized by Thinkers50 as one of the top leadership thinkers globally. I am also a syndicated columnist and contributing editor on topics of leadership, innovation and problem solving. I have been married for nearly 30 years and am a proud father and grandfather.

The Most Misunderstood Aspect Of Great Leadership

I was recently asked what I consider to be the most misunderstood aspect of great leadership; in other words, what makes great leadership great? What immediately came to mind is not only misunderstood, but it also happens to be the most often overlooked element of leadership, and the one which also affords leaders the greatest opportunity for personal, professional, and enterprise growth. If you want to become a better leader in 2015, I suggest you become comfortable with a leadership practice few are – surrender.

Surrender – not for the faint of heartYou’ll rarely encounter the words leadership and surrender used together in complementary fashion. Society has labeled surrender as a sign of leadership weakness, when in fact, it can be among the greatest of leadership strengths. Let me be clear, I’m not encouraging giving in or giving up – I am suggesting you learn the ever so subtle art of letting go.

A leader simply operates at their best when they understand their ability to influence is much more fruitful than their ability to control. Here’s the thing – the purpose of leadership is not to shine the spotlight on yourself, but to unlock the potential of others so they can in turn shine the spotlight on countless more. Control is about power – not leadership. Surrender allows a leader to get out of their own way and focus on adding value to those whom they serve.

Surrender – control freaks need not apply If you’re still not convinced the art of leadership is learning the focus point should be on surrender not control, consider this: control restricts potential, limits initiative, and inhibits talent. Surrender fosters collaboration, encourages innovation and enables possibility. Controlling leaders create bottlenecks rather than increase throughput. They signal a lack of trust and confidence, and often come across as insensitive if not arrogant. When you experience weak teams, micro-management, frequent turf wars, high stress, operational strain, and a culture of fear, you are experiencing what control has to offer – not very attractive is it?

Surrender allows the savvy leader to serve where control demands the ego-centric leader be served. Surrender allows leadership to scale and a culture of leadership to be established. Surrender prefers loose collaborative networks over rigid hierarchical structures allowing information to be more readily shared and distributed. Leaders who understand surrender think community, ecosystem, and culture – not org chart. Surrender is what not only allows the dots to be connected, but it’s what allows to dots to be multiplied. Controlling leaders operate in a world of addition and subtraction, while the calculus of a leader who understands surrender is built on exponential multiplication.

I have found those who embrace control are simply attempting to consolidate power, while those who practice surrender are facilitating the distribution of authority. When what you seek is to build into others more than glorifying self you have developed a level of leadership maturity that values surrender over control. Surrender is the mindset which creates the desire for leaders to give credit rather than take it, to prefer hearing over being heard, to dialogue instead of monologue, to have an open mind over a closed mind, to value unlearning as much as learning. Control messages selfishness, while surrender conveys selflessness – which is more important to you?

Surrender – when not to Keep this in mind – we all surrender, but not all surrender is honorable. Some surrender to their ego, to the wrong priorities, or to other distractive habits. Others surrender to the positive realization they are not the center of the universe – they surrender to something beyond themselves in order to accomplish more for others. Bottom line – what you do or don’t surrender to will define you. Assuming you surrender to the right things, surrender is not a sign of leadership weakness, but is perhaps the ultimate sign of leadership confidence. I’ll leave you with this quote from William Booth: “The greatness of a mans power is the measure of his surrender.”

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Leaders operate within their organization echo system and their behavior is manifestation to “how things work”. This means, unless their top leadership adopt such mind-set, they would continue practice controlling style.

Mike really loved me William Booth’s phrase, but I’m going to add a sentence mia: “We are all the result of a causal coincidence” accident that has caused you to be an opinion leader and myself an independent thinker. In another casual circunscancia you would develop in another task and would have caused other consequences. Also the fact that I happen to have read the excellent articles and criticize in part. What importance do you give to chance (being in the right place at the right time) in the causation of a leader, or in the production of a leader?

I agree with you mike! Alot of leaders don’t surrender for fear of losing control of their teams yet its the other way round. By being controlling, they hinder their teams from working to their full potential- Actually, the teams find themselves working to fulfill the leader’s demands not the organization’s demands (mission) which can greatly cripple the organization’s talent pool & innovation. Great companies like Google, have greatly benefited from this surrender model. Google leaders empower their teams to contribute ideas to the company through their Innovation time offs which has seen a lot of great products emerge eg Gmail.

ONE MUST OVERSTAND HOW TO LEAD HIMSELF, KNOWING AND CARING ARE RULES OF INTRODUCING ONE’S SKILLS AND ABILITY TO THOSE WHO WOULD FOLLOW. ANY GREAT LEADER MUST OVERSTAND THE JOB OF ALL EMLOYEE’S AND BE WILLING TO STEP IN AND TAKE OVER IF NEEDED, THUS SHOWING THE ABILITY TO DO EVERY JOB FROM THE GROUND UP TO CEO. AMEN RA

Traditional theory tells us that we should organize by hierarchy and assigned authority, control information flow (out of fear of misuse), and manage and control employees (out of fear of anarchy). But when success depends less on efficient execution of well-defined repetitive tasks and more on adaptive teamwork, problem-solving, and sharing knowledge, how often do practices based on traditional management assumptions lead to intense engagement and high performance?

To create more inspiring, engaging, high performing and resilient workplaces, we need to rebuild our organizations on more appropriate foundation concepts such as distributed leadership, transparency, trust, and selfless collaboration.

When we reconnect leadership to its environment, by always considering it within the broader context of collaboration and within the specific contexts of the cultures which support and characterize it, we see the greater challenge before us. Our challenge, as you point out, is not only to improve ourselves, but to focus on developing those around us and supporting the behaviors and building organizational cultures that recognize and reward true collaboration.